Jerry of the excellent JerryRigEverything YouTube channel put the new Oppo Find X Android phone ($1000) to his custom stress test. Jerry's tested the durability of over 100 phones by scratching, burning, and bending them. When he tried bending this phone with his hands, Jerry discovered that it was very easy to bend, unlike 90% of the other phones he's tested. He has added the Oppo Find X to his shelf of shame.

I am quite fond of this $29 Apple watch band. (more…)

In select locations, Canadian restaurant chain Boston Pizza has started adding 3D-printed chairs to surround that little plastic pizza-saver, aka the pizza table. They call it the Pizza Patio Set.Adweek:

Evidently the Orange Menace is unimpressed by son-in-law Jared Kushner's attempts to bilk dollars out of his White House job, and longs for his daughter's purported ex-boyfriend.Via Talking Points Memorandum:

Spoiler alert: to steal from prisoners and their families. (more…)

Domestic workers -- overwhelming female, overwhelmingly racialized -- have historically been exempted from traditional labor protections, from the minimum wage to workplace safety to recourse for harassment and worse. (more…)

Winner of 15 E3 Awards, including Best PC Game and Best Strategy Game, Sid Meier's Civilization VI is a game that needs no introduction. But, in case you've been out of the loop for the last two decades, this franchise has consistently set the standard for addictive strategy gaming since its debut in 1991. Its latest installment continues to raise the bar, and you can get it, as well as the Rise and Fall expansion, on sale for more than 30% off today.Putting you in charge of your own civilization, Sid Meier's Civilization VI tasks you with guiding your empire through the eras by waging war, conducting diplomacy, advancing your culture, and going head to head with history's greatest leaders. The Rise and Fall expansion takes the challenge further by adding more weight to your choices, as the right decisions can catapult your civilization into a Golden Age, while the wrong ones can send you back into a harrowing Dark Age.You can get the Sid Meier's Civilization VI Bundle on sale today for $56.99, saving more than 30% off its usual price.

The Game Changers is a new documentary about the vegan movement within sports and physically demanding occupations. It's by Louie Psihoyos (director of The Cove) and executive produced by James Cameron. (more…)

Last week, I sent an SMS to our babysitter that said, "Hey, are you free to sit on," and rather than offering autocomplete suggestions like "Saturday" or "Friday," the default Android keyboard suggested "on my face and." (more…)

Calgary's Chinook Centre and Market Mall -- operated by Cadillac Fairview -- have been caught running background software that analysed the footage from the CCTVs in the malls' electronic directories to guess at the age and gender of visitors, without consent or notification. (more…)

I hate using a dirty pipe or bong. Randy's Black Label gets glassware clean as new, with very little effort. (more…)

A small but vital genre of homebrew portable computers is the "cyberspace deck," in which hackers create DIY, special-purpose computers inspired by the ICE-breaking console-cowboy decks of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). (more…)

Photographer Tom Hegen has gotten quite good at capturing lovely overhead shots of human altered landscapes, like his Tulip Series. He's doing a Kickstarter for his first book, so check it out. (more…)

Doug Ford, AKA Laughable Bumblefuck II, won the Ontario provincial elections with a cowardly, trumpian campaign that kicked off with a bitter leadership race within his own party, whose top spot was up for grabs because the previous leader was accused of getting young party activists drunk and then having sex with them. (more…)

The Clickhole is in incredible form with Step Right Up And Feast Your Eyes On The Unfathomable Comey, The Man Who Is Both Good And Bad! The Beautiful Monster Who Makes Resisters’ Minds Spin! Betrayer Of Hillary! Enemy Of Trump! Behold This Freak Of Nature! It's a timely reminder that the FBI is a domestic surveillance agency with a long, dishonorable history of antidemocratic suppression of justice movements, and that nice guys with a commitment to decency and shared prosperity do not get appointed to head such institutions. (more…)

A buugeng is an S-shaped staff that looks like an ancient weapon but is a recent invention for jugglers and performers, often used in pairs. YouTuber Silent Awareness gives a lovely demonstration with an LED-embedded set. (more…)

Ambigrams are words or symbols styled so they still have meaning when viewed from another perspective. This video is a great overview of some of the best artists and books on the craft. (more…)

Want to take your modelmaking to the next level? here's a cool way to make dynamic bases with lit-up explosions. (more…)

Six weeks after Bernie Sanders rallied Disneyland employees to call for a $15/hour minimum wage, the company has announced that the minimum wage will rise from $11/h to $13.25 today, and again to $15 on Jan 1, and again to $15.45/h in June 2020 -- homelessness is rampant among Disneyland employees, and Disney had engineered a longrunning complete takeover of the local government, raking in hundreds of millions in breaks and subsidies, until, finally, anti-Disney candidates attained a majority in 2018.

ProPublica's Michael Grabell and Topher Sanders obtained police reports and call logs from more than 70 of the 100 shelters housing immigrant children. What the documents reveal: “If you're a predator, it's a gold mine.” (more…)

A 6-year old girl separated from her mom under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy was sexually abused inside a Southwest Key shelter in Arizona, reports The Nation. (more…)

Twitter's stock closed 20.5% on Friday after the company announced it lost 1 million active users. More user loss is predicted. (more…)

Unused footage of Carrie Fisher from The Last Jedi will be put to use in Episode IX, reports Hollywood Reporter. Mark Hamill will return as Luke Skywalker, as will Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian.

Awoo. [Obscuritory.com]

For at least a couple of years, Twitter has allowed one porn spam bot to clog up search results for common women's names, as well as for names of young female celebrities. It would not take a lot to create an algorithm to block this specific spam, but it's still here, because Twitter can't seem to address the platform's pervasive hostility to women. (more…)

Members of the Ghanaian lost their composure in fits of giggles and guffaws when MP John Frimpong Osei listed out the names of towns in his district that were awaiting electrification. (more…)

There is a conspiracy theory that Pepsico's Kurkure corn puffs -- developed and sold in India -- contain plastic; there's a much wider discussion in which people are making fun of this dumb theory (while simultaneously pointing out that Kurkure might as well be made of plastic, given their nutritional value and flavor). (more…)

I'd seen videos where workers cut and bleached new jeans (and the laser-toting robots that will replace them) but this one shows a much more convincing method: lumpy artificial "legs" inflated under the jeans, which are then sanded for a more realistic impression of age and use.

Facebook's down 20% and Twitter's down 14%, for reasons that everyone now says are obvious. But the same pundit class was boosting them until reality bit:One of the funny things about news aggregators, and filtered feeds in general (as opposed to chronological ones) is how they hide time and change and make everything seem immediate. Yesterday's confident bullshit gets posed against today's naked truth, competing with it until no-one's left who believes anything there.

The International Garden municipal park in Cairo, Egypt is under scrutiny after Mahmoud Sarhan, 18, visited the zoo and noticed that the "zebras" looked very much like donkeys painted with stripes. His photos of the bizarre beasts went viral yet Garden Project director Mohammed Sultan insists that the "The zebra is real and not painted."From CNN:

My 12-year-old-son had a long weekend of fun with the original Nintendo Labo Variety Kit for the Switch. The cardboard contraptions truly embody some marvelous engineering and creativity. Admittedly, the novelty wore off fairly quickly but that doesn't mean we won't be buying the new Toy-Con 03 Vehicle Kit when it comes out in September. You can pre-order it from Amazon for $70.

Two New Orleans police officers were charged with battery this week after beating up a man they decided was a "fake American," reports CBS News. The officers were white and the victim hispanic; they told him they "didn't like his camouflage clothing."

Al Shabab (previously) is an Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group whose use of child soldiers, brutal murder, and attacks targeted at civilians have allowed them to carve out a jihadi-controlled territory in Somalia. (more…)

From San Jose to Austin to Portland to Seattle (to name just a few), house prices are slumping, inventories are ballooning, and not-a-Nobel-Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller -- famed for spotting bubbles before they burst -- says "This could be the very beginning of a turning point." (more…)

Colbert revels in the ridiculous logic behind a conservative columnists response to attending an Ocasio-Cortez speech.

Darth Vader only appeared on screen for 34 minutes yet is the most visually iconic character of the original trilogy. Nerdwriter's Evan Puschak explains why.

Bicyclists who also own motorcycles and motorscooters have come up with some clever ways to mount their human-powered two-wheeler on their motor-powered vehicles. (more…)

Research into the shittiness of voice assistants zeroed in on a problem that many people were all-too-aware of: the inability of these devices to recognize "accented" speech ("accented" in quotes because there is no one formally correct English, and the most widely spoken English variants, such as Indian English, fall into this "accented" category). (more…)

After learning that Amazon was pushing the use of Rekognition, its facial recognition tool, for use in policing (a global phenomenon that is gaining momentum despite the material unsuitability of these tools in policing contexts), the ACLU of Northern California had a brainwave: they asked Rekognition to evaluate the faces of the 115th Congress of the United States. (more…)

Extracting earth's natural resources created some of the world's greatest fortunes. Many believe that trend will continue in space, as mining three types of asteroids leads to enormous material yields. (more…)

When last we met the Four Thieves Vinegar collective -- a group of anarchist scientists who combine free/open chemistry with open source hardware in response to shkrelic gouging by pharma companies -- they were announcing the epipencil, a $30 DIY alternative to the Epipen, Mylan's poster-child for price-gouging and profiteering on human misery. (more…)

Ask any IT expert worth their salt, and they'll tell you certifications are key for climbing up the IT ladder. However, few are as compelling as one from Cisco. A worldwide leader in networking solutions, Cisco is a key player in many a company's IT infrastructures; so proving you're competent with their tools and equipment can dramatically improve your hiring potential. To this end, the Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle can help you get your foot in the door with instruction designed to help you ace a number of requisite Cisco certification exams. It's on sale today for $49, plus you can save an additional 50% with the coupon code DIGITALWEEK50.Jam-packed with nine courses on wireless networking, security, and more, this collection offers a multi-faceted look at IT and the various specializations you can break into with the appropriate certifications. You'll start by learning the skills for entry-level network support positions. Then, you'll advance to more nuanced and specialized topics, such as developing security infrastructures, implementing scaleable Cisco routers, and more.The Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle was on sale for $59, but it's available at a new price drop this week only. You can get it today for $49, and enter coupon code DIGITALWEEK50 to save an additional 50%.

Ben Avlis makes surprising and sometimes slightly disturbing folded cartoons that reveal something surprising when unfolded. (more…)

Artificial intelligence has nearly unimaginable potential to shape the world, but it poses a number of significant ethical questions that need to be carefully examined at every step to reduce bias. Several experts give a rundown of the main concerns. (more…)

Shape of Life is a classic series produced by Sea Studios Foundation. Here, they show how sponges feed by placing harmless dye around the outside of a sponge. (more…)

This remarkable footage of wingsuit pilots hurtling through a cloud cave may leave you wondering how they got the shot. It's with a technique called overcapture, where 360 video is manipulated in postproduction to allow for panning and other effects. (more…)

Siberian roundworms frozen for millennia were thawed and are happily going about their business again, reports The Siberian Times.

Need to relax for a couple of minutes? Don those headphones and head over to Sand Tagious for some very satisfying slicing and smooshing of kinetic sand. (more…)